The Best Performing Utilities And Which Of Them Are Still Cheap

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Utility dividend stocks with highest performance year-to-date originally published at long-term-investments.blogspot.com. Utilities are often high dividend payers but they also have high debt amounts and their growth abilities are very limited. Normally you should not expect higher capital gains due to the slow growth and high investment costs.

It's surprising that the best performing utilities gained 18 percent to 80 percent within the first six months of the year. I my view, it's a shift to quality business models with higher yields and stable returns. Investors look for investment alternatives outside the bond sector and utilities are a place to be for the time being.

You can find a small list of the 20 best performing utility dividend stocks. I excluded all companies with a market capitalization below 300 million. They are definitely too risky and some of them have an extraordinary high return. Lower valuated companies dominating the top results. The average market capitalization amounts to 3.6 billion.

Despite the large price increase of the stocks, twelve of them still have a buy or better rating.

Take a closer look at the full list. The average P/E ratio amounts to 26.85 and forward P/E ratio is 17.69. The dividend yield has a value of 3.59 percent. Price to book ratio is 2.29 and price to sales ratio 2.67. The operating margin amounts to 20.43 percent and the beta ratio is 0.76. Stocks from the list have an average debt to equity ratio of 1.31.